Handling Multiple Job Steps

If your job has more than one job step, you must impose an order of execution on the job steps. This is called control-of-flow. You can add new job steps and rearrange the flow of job steps at any time. The changes take effect the next time the job is run. This illustration shows a control-of-flow for a database backup job.

You define a control-of-flow action for the success and failure of each job step. You must specify the action to be taken when a job step succeeds and when a job step fails. You can also define the number of and interval between retry attempts for failed job steps.

Job steps must be atomic. A job cannot pass Boolean values, data, or numeric values between job steps. You can pass values from one Transact-SQL job step to another by using permanent tables or global temporary tables. You can pass values from one CmdExec job step to another by using files.

Note  If you create looping job steps (job step 1 is followed by job step 2, then job step 2 returns to job step 1), a warning message appears when the job is created using SQL Server Enterprise Manager.

SQL Server Agent records job and job step execution information in the job history.

To set job step success or failure flow